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Clouds:

Walter Benjamin and the Rhetoric of the Image

By

Michael Powers

B.A., New College of Florida, 2007

M.A., Brown University, 2011

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the

Department of German Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015

© Copyright 2015 by Michael Powers

iii This dissertation by Michael Powers is accepted in its present form by the Department of German Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_____________ _________________________________

Gerhard Richter, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date_____________ _________________________________

Susan Bernstein, Reader

Date_____________ _________________________________

Kevin McLaughlin, Reader

Date_____________ _________________________________

Zachary Sng, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date_____________ _________________________________

Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iv

CURRICULUM VITAE

Michael Powers was born in 1985 in Miami, Florida. He graduated with a B.A. in German Studies from New College of Florida in 2007. In 2008 he entered the graduate program in German Studies at Brown University and received his M.A. in 2011. In 2011-

2012 he was awarded a fellowship from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst

(DAAD) to conduct dissertation work in Berlin, Germany with an affiliation at the Freie participate in the Cornell University School of Criticism and Theory. While at Brown, he served as a primary instructor for a range of German-language courses, and also served as a teaching assistant for the Department of German Studies, working closely with Professors Gerhard Richter, Susan Bernstein, and Zachary Sng. He has an article entitled forthcoming in 2015 in German Quarterly. In 2014, Michael Powers was the recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Brown University Graduate

School.

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The completion of this dissertation was made possible thanks to the kind support of several individuals. First, I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Gerhard Richter, for his thoughtful guidance and attentive feedback throughout the entire dissertation-writing process. I benefitted greatly from his expertise, as well as from his steadfast encouragement, and I look forward to many more conversations with him as I continue to shape this project in the future. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee for their generous assistance in helping me to develop this project: Susan Bernstein, for her insightful input on the various chapters I shared with her along the way; Kevin McLaughlin, for always welcoming me to discuss my work with him, and for sharing numerous suggestions and ideas with me; and Zachary Sng, for the countless conversations and constant, unflagging confidence in my work. I am grateful to all of them for their invaluable guidance and support. At Brown, I have also benefitted from many teachers, colleagues, and friends who have directly, or indirectly, contributed to the completion of this project: Benjamin Brand, Eric Foster, Stephanie Galasso, Rebecca Haubrich, Dennis Johannssen, Silja Maehl, Kristina Mendicino, Thomas Schestag, Jane Sokolosky, and Seth Thorn. I thank them all, including my friends in Germany, Philipp Marquardt and Philipp Staab, for exchanging their work, ideas, and excitement with me, and for the innumerable discussions that we have had in the past, and that I hope we will continue to have in the future. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support in all of my endeavors, academic or otherwise. I owe my love for language to my mother and father, and vi I would like to especially thank my father for always acting as a role model for me and for constantly supporting me along the long journey that has taken me to this point. I also thank my sister and my brothers for their support over the last years, which rarely saw me at a family function without at least some seemingly pressing dissertation-related work that I thought I needed to direly return to. My final thanks go to Kathryn Sederberg, who has been an unmatched source of comfort, encouragement, and inspiration over the last seven years. Without her generous help and untiring belief in my work, this dissertation would not have come to fruition. I dedicate my dissertation to her. vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page iii

Curriculum Vitae iv

Acknowledgements v

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: 19

Chapter 2: Photographic Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Stieglitz, Benjamin, Derrida 56 Chapter 3: Weather and Time: Benjamin and the Limits of the Utopic Imagination 114

Chapter 4: Wolkige Stellen-World 172

Bibliography 214

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2 Alfred

Figure 2.3 Stieglitz: 1929

Figure 2.4 Stieglitz: 1926

Figure 3.1 om Wetter

Figure 4.1

1

Introduction

Clouds: Walter Benjamin and the Rhetoric of the Image Perhaps the most trenchant convergence of vision and language in the work of Walter Benjamin occurs in his posthumously published Arcades Project (1940). At the center of das dialektische Bild) or become a touchstone for readers of Benjamin.1 In order to set the course for a larger investigation into the interrelation of vision and language in the variegated writings of Benjamin, this introduction begins with a brief overview and analysis of this key e dialectical image as my point of departure, I aim to show how many of the core features at the heart of this concept are tied to an unorthodox, specifically Benjaminian re-thinking of both vision and language in terms of their mediality. The dialectical image, as Benjamin conceives it, marks one of several cases in which vision and language function not merely (nor even primarily) as

1 Although Benjamin coined the term, his friend Theodor W. Adorno was the first to use it in print in his

1933 Habilitationsschrift. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Tübingen:

Mohr, 1933). This set of affairs eventually led to the uncanny situation of Adorno accusing Benjamin of misusing his own concept in the 1935 exposé of what was to become the Arcades Project. For a gloss of the

dialectics in general, see Sven Kramer, Walter Benjamin zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2003), 124-30. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 136-

84. Michael Grossheim, "Archaisches oder

Dialektisches Bild?: zum Kontext einer Debatte zwischen Adorno und Benjamin," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 71(1997). 2 transparent media through which mediation occurs. Rather, in the dialectical image, as elsewhere, Benjamin treats these two spheres as media in a radical senseas dynamic spheres of non-identity in which mediality itself understood as a movement of constant splitting, taking-leave-of-oneself, and de-formation occurs. As I will demonstrate over the course of this dissertation, clouds occupy a as they allow exceptional insight into such a dynamic, dispersive structure of mediality in both its imagistic and linguistic modalities. As dynamic, immaterial, ungrounded modes of relation that hover between transparency and opacity, revelation and concealment, the spheres of vision and language are clouds. But to be a cloud does not mean to be anything substantial, as clouds refuse to remain settled and are defined by their constant shifting, moving away from themselves, becoming other at all times. As a figure of disfigurationa radically disfigured and disfiguring figureclouds disclose a structure of self-alterity and self- the media of vision and language, but also the relation between these two cloud-like spectrums, as one often seems to drift into and converge with the other (or is it the same?) throughout his thought. Before returning to this notion of cloudy mediality, let us revisit the concept of the dialectical image as a paradigmatic example of the imago- thinking. In the analysis that follows, I emphasize the role of visual rhetoric in this concept in an attempt to illuminate the uniquely Benjaminian mode of thinking in the image.2

2 For a comprehensive reading of the Denkbild in the writings of Benjamin (and others associated with the

Frankfurt School), see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from 3

The Dialectical Image

lectical movement that proceeds teleologically in stages, Benjamin attempts in the Arcades Project to rethink historical materialism and its underlying concept of time (linear, progressive, continuous) from a fragmented, a-teleological perspective. History, as Benjamin views it, is not a direct, linear movement from past to present or present to past. As he argues in the closely- as a tale of progressnot only of temporal progression, but also constant societal and cultural improvementis a the narrative that later generations take as quasi-natural truth.3 Criticizing the hegemonic control that the ruling classes and corresponding narratives exert over our perception of history, he draws our attention to the active role that the historiographer plays in (re-)constructing history. The naïve notion that historians merely reconstitute the past as it was overlooks not only all that civilization excludes from its historical meta-narrative, but also the way in which unique events are reduced to mere causal moments from the perspective of the historical gaze. In this way, the classical conception of time as a linear, progressive movement entails a certain synthetic violence, Benjamin suggests, insofar as it forces the discontinuous, heterogeneous, singular moments in time to blend together, becoming sublated into the

Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). For a useful reconstruction of the how the word

see Eberhard Wilhelm Schulz, "Zum Wort "Denkbild"," in Wort und Zeit: Aufsatze und Vortrage zur Literaturgeschichte (Neumünster: K.

Wachholtz, 1968).

3 According to Benjamin, bourgeois historicism tends to assume the perspective of and empathize with the

GS 1.2:695-96). Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte

1974-1989). Henceforth all subsequent references to the Gesammelte Schriften and Gesammelte Briefe will

be abbreviated as GS or GB followed by volume and page number. Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph 4 dialectical march of history. In his writings on history, Benjamin expresses the desire for a more dynamic, non-integrative model of history that would take into account and respect the singularity of each individual moment, while simultaneously seeking the relation between these individual points without reducing them to a homogenous continuum of historical time. For the Benjamin of the 1930s, the dialectical image becomes the key term to describe such a radical revaluation of historical thinking. The Arcades Project, a study of the dispersed origins of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris, was to embody t of fragments. The unfinished text consists of an imposing collection of citations that Benjamin gathered throughout the last decade of his life. Each citation, as a fragment or snippet of a larger diachronic narrativethe story or (con)text from which it was pluckedexemplifies the fragmented structure of time that concerns Benjamin. Placed into a montage-like structure, these moments of time exist independently and yet, paradoxically, in relation to one another, although not in the conventional sense of a causal, linear series of progressive events. In Konvolut N of the Arcades Projectthe theoretical nucleus of the work in which the concept of the dialectical image is laid out Benjamin repeatedly employs optical imagery in order to describe this different model of historical analysis, which he says is ultimately rooted in language: dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt blitzhaft zu einer Konstellation zusammentritt. Mit anderen Worten: Bild ist die Dialektik Vergangenheit eine rein zeitliche, kontinuierliche ist, ist die des Gewesnen zum Jetzt dialektisch: ist nicht Verlauf sondern Bild, sprunghaft. Nur 5 dialektische Bilder sind echte (d.h.: nicht archaische) Bilder; und der Ort, an dem man sie antrifft, ist die Sprache.4 Benjamin outlines two opposing approaches towards history in this passage.5 In the first, he describes the perspective of conventional historiography. In this paradigm, the past points along a stable timeline. Whether looking at the past from the perspective of the present or approaching the present from the past, history is conceived of as a linear, uninterrupted movement, from point A to point B. Much as in the term enlightenment, in this conventional model of history, light functions as a metaphor for clarity and demystification. Past and present mutually illuminate one another, each shedding light /LFKW"ZLUIW through timehere figured in the medium of light transparently and continuously connecting past and presentin order to reconstruct what he sees in writing. In this model, light is a metaphor not only for the structure of linear time, but also for the imagined gaze of the historian. Just as past and present look upon, shed light on one another, the historian who looks at the past does so as a subject looking at an object. History is conceived here as dealing with dead objects of study. The historian deals with images in the conventional sense, as traces of bygone events that allow him to relate transitively to the past across an empty medium. In this scenario, he approaches the past as something that can be dissected, understood from a distance, reconstructed and, in short, brought to light.

4 GS 5.1:578.

5 For more on the opposition of these two models of history, see Krista R. Greffrath, Metaphorischer

Materialismus: Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbegriff Walter Benjamins (München: W. Fink, 1981), 54-

61.
6 In the second model Benjamin puts forward, the one which represents his own revised conception of Marxist historical materialism, history is presented in decidedly imagistic relation of past and present occurs (Jetzt-has-Gewesene). The everyday diction (Jetzt, Gewesene) with which Benjamin depicts the dialectical image in contrast with their abstract, technical models. In the dialectical image, we are not dealing with a detached, abstract conceptualization of history. Instead history is something much more lively, an Jetzt), a certain historical mode of being (at the root of Gewesene we find Wesenbeing).6 The idea of a stable past (Vergangene) and present that occupiesand the corresponding conception of time as a homogenous, linear vacuum assumes that there is a stable, removed point from which to perceive (read, see) history.7 In the dialectical image, however, this assumption is supplanted by the conception of a historically-immanent, ungrounded that is always fleeting and moving away even from itself.8

6 Detectable at the ro

lingering desire to rehabilitate the concept of experience (Erfahrung Michael W. Jennings, "Profane Illuminations: Benjamin's Theory of Experience and Philosophy of Language," in Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1987).

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